PPC Without Pity

Well folks, it’s been one whole year since I embarked on this little PPC blog endeavor. I want to extend a special thank you to everyone in the search engine marketing community who has helped this blog grow throughout the past year. In case you’re just tuning in, here are the top PPC Without Pity posts for 2009, based on traffic numbers from Google Analytics:

1. Some Changes For Yahoo This Week

I must admit I’m a little surprised that my recap of Yahoo PPC changes got the most visits of any single blog post this year. I guess it goes to show that there’s still some love for Yahoo’s PPC offering, despite my snarky comments about it.

2. Free Automated PPC Bid Management (Thanks, Google!)

There was definitely some interest in this hot tip about creating automated bid management formulas using AdWords spreadsheet editing. I love it when geeks like us hack a new functionality to do something beyond what was intended.

3. How Do I Increase PPC Conversions?

Ah, the burning question that haunts all of us PPC marketers. A good read for PPC beginners, or seasoned pros that could use a refresher.

4. Viewing Visits From Mobile Devices In Google Analytics

2009 seemed like the year in which everyone started surfing the web from their smartphones. 2010 is poised to be an even bigger year for smartphone web use. To get ready, check out this post to see how you can segment your traffic tracking in Google Analytics to monitor the behavior of users who are visiting your site from smartphones and other mobile devices.

5. Using Negative Keywords Effectively

If you’re having trouble reining in your cost per conversion in your PPC campaigns, you should read this post to learn more about negative keywords. Negative keywords can help filter your PPC traffic, and eliminate visits from people who are unlikely to convert. Filtering out this traffic can reduce the amount of unqualified clicks on your ads, and save you a lot of money in the long run.

Well, that’s it for this year, folks. I’ll be back in 2010 with more PPC blog goodness. Happy new year, and here’s to a profitable and productive 2010 for all of you PPC marketers out there.

To be an effective PPC marketer, it helps to have a lot of tools in your arsenal. Choosing good keywords takes a lot of background research, and it’s always great to have plenty of options for keyword tools. This week, WordStream released two new keyword tools to help PPC managers find new keywords and organize them into effective groupings.

The first tool is the WordStream Keyword Niche Finder. This tool allows you to generate a list of suggested keywords and niches to target after you enter a root keyword. Here’s an example using the root keyword “ppc marketing”:

The Keyword Niche finder not only shows you the relative popularity of related keywords (indicated by the blue bar graph), it sorts the keywords generated into related groups. In this case, we get some groups like “ppc marketing >> internet,” “ppc marketing >> search engine web,” and “ppc marketing >> online.” You can then use these niche groupings to build out campaigns and ad groups. This saves a lot of time in the campaign generation process. Using this tool, you automatically get like terms grouped together, and you can determine which keywords are going to be high traffic generators and which ones are more likely to be long-tail keywords.

The second tool WordStream released this week is the Keyword Grouper. With this tool, you can take an existing list of PPC keywords and automatically segment them into relevant groups. This is really handy if you just generated a huge list of keywords from another tool like WordTracker or the Google Keyword Tool. Just export a text file of the keywords you want, cut and paste them into the WordStream Keyword Grouper, and everything gets grouped instantly! This is a great organizational tool, and a must-have for anyone who deals with large amounts of keywords on a daily basis.

These two new tools join the ranks of the excellent Free Keyword Tool by WordStream. This older tool can get you some really helpful suggestions if you’re just starting out a new campaign and need some new keyword ideas. It works great in tandem with other keyword tools in your arsenal. For best results, use multiple keyword tools in your research to get the maximum amount of useful keywords for your efforts.

WordStream also offers a host of paid PPC and SEO management solutions if you’re looking for more robust management and research programs. Check them out at http://www.WordStream.com

Earlier this month, Google released a beta version of new code snippet that enables asynchronous tracking in Google Analytics. So what exactly is this, you ask? Well, under the current setup of Google Analytics, code is read sequentially by the user’s browser. When a page loads, first the header is rendered, then the body, then all of the elements in the body, etc. Most people put their Google Analytics snippets just before the close body tag, so the analytics script is one of the last things executed by the browser. If a user is having issues with Javascript or slow load times, sometimes the code snippet won’t be executed and you won’t get accurate data. You could move the snippet higher in the code to solve the loss of tracking fidelity, but due to the sequential nature of browser rendering, there may be a page load delay as the browser tries to execute the Google Analytics Javascript before it executes the rest of the HTML code.

With this new asynchronous tracking snippet, the Javascript code is executed separately from the rest of your scripts and HTML content. This means that you can put your tracking snippet higher up in the page code and not experience a page load delay as the browser executes the code. Think of it this way: the old Google Analytics code was a one-lane road, where cars (or in this case, scripts) couldn’t pass each other. Asynchronous tracking opens up another lane, where your Google Analytics code can zip by the rest of your sluggish code without impacting site load times.

So what does this all mean for PPC? Well, the main benefit of this asynchronous tracking is an improvement in site load times. And site load time is a commonly overlooked factor in landing page optimization. Consider this paper by Ron Kohavi and Roger Longbotham. In a web experiment, they tested the effect of site load times on Amazon.com. They found that for every 100 millisecond increase in site load time, sales decreased by 1 percent. One hundred milliseconds! That’s only a tenth of a second. It’s barely perceptible, yet somehow has a drastic effect on the psychology of e-commerce. A poorly implemented analytics tracking snippet could probably hold up your site loading time by this amount.

Sure, the new asynchronous tracking snippet promises greater accuracy in Google Analytics (always a good thing), but I think it’s the improved site load time that’s going to make the real impact. Good PPC marketers should always pay attention to what their analytics programs are telling them. But maybe we should be paying attention to what our analytics snippets are doing to our pages, as well. Having a web page that loads slowly and awkwardly could be costing you sales and conversions, and you wouldn’t even know it.

Making effective PPC keyword bids is part art, and part science. It can be a daunting task deciding what your keyword bids should be, especially since there’s quite a bit of money on the line. If you bid too low, you risk your ads never showing on the first page results, and having only a mere trickle of traffic coming to your site. If you bid too high, you can get top keyword positions, but the expense could be so great that your return on ad spend can dip into the negatives.

In order to make an effective keyword bid, you need to start with a baseline figure of your target cost per acquisition (CPA). Figure out what the absolute maximum is that you can pay for a lead, sale, or conversion and still make a profit. Then, dip into historical data to know what kind of conversion rate you can expect to get on that particular keyword (for new keywords, you’ll just have to make your best guess). Finally, to determine the maximum amount you should bid, you need to multiply your target CPA times your expected conversion rate.

So here’s the formula:

Target CPA x Expected Conversion Rate = Max PPC bid

Here’s an example. Let’s say my target CPA for selling widgets is $50. Based on my historical PPC data, I can see that my conversion rate for widget keywords is around 5%. So I would multiply $50 times 5% to find that the maximum amount I should bid on widget keywords is $2.50.

Of course, just because you bid $2.50 on a PPC keyword doesn’t mean that you’re going to be paying exactly $2.50 for every click. That gives you a little wiggle room (and profit!) to work with.

In some cases, you may find that your max CPC bid isn’t enough to get you on the first page, either due to CPA restrictions, intensely competitive verticals, or poor quality scores. In this case, you should probably just let go of these keywords and pick some other ones that might be a little less competitive and a little more profitable for you. By using this handy PPC bid formula, you can make sure that your campaign expenses stay on track, and that you’re getting a good ROI for all of your active PPC keywords.

This week in Google Analytics news: German officials are trying to ban websites based in their country from using Google Analytics (you can read the full story at TechCrunch). They claim that Google is collecting personally identifiable information without users’ consent, and that this could potentially break privacy laws. To me, this is a great example of people being terrified of technology that they don’t understand.

Before all the German villagers bust out the pitchforks and torches, let’s get one thing straight: Google Analytics does not collect any personally-identifiable information. Period. As a frequent user of Google Analytics, the most I can tell about someone is what city they (or most likely, their internet service provider) is from, what pages they’ve visited on the site, and how long they spent there. Sure, there’s a lot else that I could do with that information to improve my website or marketing campaigns, but there is no freaking way that I could decode an individual’s identity from my Google Analytics data. And that’s assuming that I would have the time or inclination to do so, since there’s no way I could possibly benefit from that information. The value of Google Analytics comes from analyzing web traffic data in the aggregate, not on an individual level.

Of course, the majority of the German government’s ire is likely directed at the data that Google itself collects. Everyone likes to paint Google as this totalitarian vacuum of internet data, parsing our identities and dirty little secrets in their data centers. Let me ask you this: assume you were leading a company that collected petabytes of data every day. How the hell could you even look for one individuals data in all of that mess? What possible benefit could you get from that? Picking the needle of one user’s data out of the mile-high haystack of Google data would take hours (maybe even days) and cost a ridiculous amount of money in payroll and resources. Even if Google wanted to figure out your individual browsing history, it would not make economic sense for them to do so. Like I said before, the value of Google data is in the aggregate, not in the individual.

If Germany is so worked up about web analytics data, why aren’t they going after Omniture, Woopra, or any number of other web analytics providers? I’ll tell you why: because the bureaucrats who want to make this happen probably don’t even know they exist. Everyone knows who Google is. Just say that Google is collecting data from web users, and the average layman knows what that means. But try to say that similar analytics solutions can be had by installing a javascript tag or looking at web logs? Only us geeks would get that.

Web analytics is not a threat to online privacy, and causing a ban on it would do a great disservice to web users everywhere. Without analytics data, you can’t improve for usability, or determine what the most-needed features of your website are. I sincerely hope that the folks in the German web industry wake their government up to what a stupid, ill-advised idea this is, and stop the Google witch hunt.

All good search engine marketers know that pay per click advertising campaigns and search engine optimization efforts work well alone, but are really awesome when they’re integrated. PPC data can often be used for great keyword research, and analysis of SEO trends can help influence the structure of your PPC campaigns. Here’s a neat little trick I’ve found to streamline your linkbuilding research by using data from PPC content network campaigns.

First, you’ll need to run a simple content network campaign (if you haven’t already), and let it run for a little while to gather data. A couple of months should do. After you’ve driven a bit of traffic through content placements, run a content network placement report in Google, Yahoo, or MSN. You should get a big, long list of websites where your content ads showed up.

Your ads showed up on these sites because the search engines determined that they were relevant to your keywords and/or business objectives. Guess what? These are exactly the kind of sites you want backlinks from! You can sift through this list of sites and see which of them might be open to posting a link or doing a link exchange. Just let the search engines do the research for you – you’ve got enough to worry about with the tedious process of actually building the links.

If you’re in love with search query reports as much as I am, I’ve got some good news for you. As part of their Fall 2009 upgrade, MSN has (finally) added search query report functionality to their pay per click advertising platform. Sure, you’ve probably been using something like a detailed search query report in Google Analytics to get this information, but it certainly couldn’t hurt to get the data straight from the source.

Running the report is super easy. Just go to to your “Reports” tab in MSN AdCenter and create a new report. Under the “Report:” drop-down, you’ll see a new option for “Search Query Performance.” Choose this option, and customize the rest of your report as necessary. Once you run it, you’ll get data on the exact search queries your MSN users are typing in when they see your PPC ads. You can then use this data to pick out negative keywords to filter out bad traffic, as well as get some insights into some keywords you might not be using already. I find that search query reports are a great way to get insight into your target customer’s heads with minimal effort on your part. This is especially important in a search engine like MSN/Bing, where it’s tough to get a lot of traffic, since Google and Yahoo tend to monopolize the search engine audience. You can leverage your search query report data to figure out new keywords that will effectively drive more traffic to your landing pages.

I know MSN is a little late to the game on this, but I give them points for trying. Yahoo still hides their search query reports behind the wall of their account reps, so you can’t even get this information without a huge hassle from them. Now if only MSN would freely offer up search query data within the campaign screens like Google does, we might start to see MSN competing on equal terms with the big boys.

Instead of a post this week, I thought that I would share a presentation I gave at the University of Texas at Austin last week. It covers some PPC basics, and also goes over how the principles of information architecture may be used to improve online marketing performance.

You can download a PDF copy at this link: Information Architecture and Web Advertising.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 license. You may freely distrubute the work, but please give credit to me as the author, and do not modify the document or use it for commercial use.

One of the most vexing issues in pay per click marketing is the problem of user intent. Sure, you can pick a lot of great keywords, but what happens when someone types in an ambiguous search term, or one that has multiple meanings depending on the context? For example, someone who types “medical coding” into their search box could be looking for a medical coding job, a book on medical coding, or a medical coding training program. Under current search engine restrictions, it’s impossible for marketers to figure out exactly what each searcher is looking for without poring through volumes of analytical data.

This week, Google announced a new feature that just might have a shot at figuring out the user intent problem. It’s called AdWords Comparison Ads, and it’s currently only rolled out to a few select advertisers in the mortgage industry. Here’s how it works: someone types in a pretty generic term like “mortgage.” When AdWords ads are served up for the search query, Google shows some radio buttons next to the ads (in the example they provide, it’s a choice between “buy a home” and “refinance”). This allows users to clarify exactly what they want. If the user selects an option, they are taken to a new page that allows them to compare mortgage rates according to their selection.

It’s a pretty neat idea, and I’m interested to see how it turns out. I’m a bit wary of the fact that it relies on voluntary data, adding more work to a search query on the user side. I guess I’m just cynical enough to think that people will be too lazy to click an extra button on a Google search. If Google sees some success with this pilot program, they plan on rolling it out to other industries. Now that’s where it would really get interesting…

When managing a pay per click advertising account, it helps to have a lot of software tools to help you manage your account, discover new keywords, track success, and perform split-tests for you. There are a lot of people out there who would love to sell you an expensive software package to accomplish these tasks. But, in my experience, everything you need to do in a PPC account can be accomplished through free tools that are easily available online. Read on for my choices of the six best free PPC tools:

6. Google Insights For Search – This tool gives you access to the vast amount of data that Google has collected on keyword searches and internet traffic trends. Simply type in the search terms you want to learn more about, select the time frame and geographic area you want to analyze, and you can view trends and relative popularity of any search term that has enough search volume to matter. This is great for discovering how popular your PPC keywords could be, as well as getting a look at likely seasonal trends before they happen.

5. MSN AdCenter Desktop – MSN AdCenter usually has the lowest traffic of the big three PPC providers, but this will soon change once Yahoo’s web properties switch to Bing search. If you’re doing PPC on either Yahoo or Bing right now, you’d better learn MSN’s tools now before your traffic increases drastically. Fortunately, MSN has recently released a desktop editor for their MSN platform, although it is still in beta. If your account meets the right requirements, you could be eligible to download it – see the above link for the steps you need to take. This desktop editor can help you make mass changes to your MSN AdCenter account, like adding multiple keywords, creating text ads in bulk, or other mass campaign/ad group changes. It certainly makes managing an MSN account a lot faster, since you don’t have to wait for multiple pages to load and re-load like in the web interface.

4. SEO Book Keyword Tool – There are lots of good keyword tools out there on the web, most of which are provided by the search engines themselves. But who wants to go back and forth between multiple keyword tools to make a single keyword list? SEO Book has a really awesome aggregator that pulls keyword data from multiple keyword tools like Google, Yahoo, and WordTracker. It’s one-stop shopping for all your keyword research needs. This tool does require that you have an SEO Book account, but registration is free. You also get access to a lot of other SEO Book resources, so it’s a pretty good deal.

3. Google Website Optimizer – Have you heard about how awesome split-testing and multivariate testing are, but the thought of doing all those statistics makes your head spin? Well, you’re in luck. With Google’s Website Optimizer tool, all you need to do is create a few variant pages, cut and paste some javascript code snippets, and the tool does the rest. It even crunches the numbers at the end to tell you conclusively which of your variant pages performed the best. And, with it’s multivariate testing feature, you can choose a set of elements (buttons, images, blocks of text, etc.), and the tool will automatically mix them up in different combinations to see which is the most effective. Split testing your landing pages couldn’t be easier.

2. Google AdWords Editor – After managing accounts with AdWords Editor, I can’t imagine doing it any other way. In fact, I hardly ever use Google’s web interface to work with PPC accounts anymore. This desktop application lets you download your account info, make whatever changes you need, then upload the changes to the web interface. It’s easy to copy and paste any element, from campaigns down to keywords. You can even select multiple keywords and change bids by percentage or dollar amount. I could do a dozen posts about all the features that it has, so it’s probably better to just read Google’s own documentation about this product. And, of course, it’s 100% free. Probably one of the best bargains on this list, considering the wide range of functionality it has.

1. Google Analytics – If you’re going to run a PPC account effectively, you must have a reliable web analytics system in place. Period. You need to be able to keep track of your web traffic, monitor how your organic and paid site traffic is interacting, and look at what keywords people are using to find your site. Google Analytics does all of this for free, and is incredibly easy to implement – just cut and paste a javascript snippet on to every page of your site, and you’re done. What’s more, there are infinite filters and segmentation formulas to allow you to customize your data. You can even set up alerts to let you know when key metrics are rising or falling. With all of this functionality, you’d probably expect to pay a hefty monthly fee for the privilege. But, unlike a lot of similar web analytics packages, this one is 100% free.

Got any more great free PPC tools? Let’s hear about them in the comments.